Archive for the ‘Emetrics San Francisco 2007’ Category

The 7th of May, when we were attending the Emetrics Summit in San francisco, Jeremiah interviewed us for his Video Show: Web Strategy.

We discuss wuth Jeremiah around different topics as: web agencies, niche interactive agencies, full service agencies, Web Analytics and accountability.
Despite the jetlag we managed to make some sense 😉

Well here is as promised a preview of the Four Gurus For You Session that took place last may in San Francisco during the Emetrics Summit. As you might know the International Committee of the Web Analytics Association organized an online event during the Emetrics Summit. This session intended to the WAA members that couldn’t attend Emetrics presented the 4 most renowned Gurus in Web Analytics answering questions from people attending the event (even virtually).

Very shortly Brian will publish over an hour of video in the WAA website. Access to the videos will be granted only to WAA members, so here’s a good reason to become a member! For about 100 euros per year, you will have the opportunity to pick the brains of these 4 Gurus and learn what are their views in Web Analytics.

On the goship side, you will see for example Avinash throwing his mobile and even hurting himself with the table.

Don’t miss this opportunity and become a member of the WAA today! And if you like this kind of stuff, please state that it was one of the reasons you joined the WAA (we’ll make some more if there’s enough positive feed-back).

René

P.S. I haven’t selected this excerpt because it was my question, well in part only 😉 ; but also because it explains the 10/20/70 rule that Eric has explained in details recently in his Blog.

The Friday following Emetrics, while Aurélie was attending the Predictive Analytics two day course, I was invited by Avinash to visit him at Google. I have to admit that I was pretty excited with the idea to visit Google’s offices as I didn’t attend the GAAC training in Dublin. So after a nice breakfast with Matthew and Jim I took a cab and went ahead to Mountain-view.

I had a taximan from Morocco that while driving was always looking to the back as we were having a very engaged discussion about the political situation of his country (in a Arabic influenced french). I have to admit that I regret to have launched the conversation as when we arrived at the highway I was afraid that we would get into an accident. But fortunately I got safe to Google’s HQ (a bit shaky I have to admit ;-)). (more…)

WebSideStory will no longer exist. Bob Chatham announced at Emetrics San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, that the nice brand WebSideStory would no longer exist, but don’t be afraid, the company hasn’t closed, it’s just that it changes its name to Visual Sciences, to better reflect the new positioning of the company.

Last year, at Emetrics Washington Bob did already a very interesting presentation explaining the positioning of WSS after VS acquisition: going towards ‘Customer Analytics’. Back then, Bob explained how Web Analytics would enlarge it’s scope from simply Web analytics to Customer Analytics going through Internet Channel Analytics and Multi-Channel Analytics. I remember that this presentation was really inspiring; Aurélie and I were very excited with this new overture in Web Analytics and by Eric’s private demo of Visual Sciences. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Visual Sciences, you may read a couple of posts that Aurélie wrote following Emetrics Washington 2006:

I’ve been playing around with blog stats in order to gauge interest and readership of the different posts we’ve rolled out over the past year and wanted to share some reflections. These findings and ideas thus stem from a simple copy-paste of blog stats for the last 365 days of this blog. I actually did this following a question asked by Chris Gemignani at the Emetrics’ blogger table about our blogging voice and if we had trouble finding it.

I do.
Maybe because I share this blog with my husband and the rest of my team.
Maybe just because I’m not always certain what people are actually interested in reading and how I could best optimise the time they graciously share with us by reading this blog.
And certainly because there are some wonderful Web analytics bloggers out there (too many to name and please watch René’s next blog post on the bloger table to get a list of very fine and smart people talking about fascinating Web Analytics related things).

So, in order to reach out to my blogging voice (again), I fist stumbled upon a post René wrote more than a year ago intitled “Why this blog?”.
The last 2 paragraphs are of interest and actually still apply and I will not comment on my waking up my husband at 2 AM… It goes like this
“Our aim is to make the market going forward and adopt Web Analytics. The era of websites seen as purely cost centers is over. Now we need to define business objectives and measure in order to report the ROI on the one hand and optimize the online initiatives on the other to maximize the returns.
We are also conscious that the Web Analytics learning curve is long and this is why we try to feed our clients with our knowledge to help them reach self sufficiency.”

Before the Emetrics Robbin Steif launched the great idea to make a table (or more) with Bloggers on Monday the 7th, so after the keynote speaches and morning presentations, Aurélie and I went to join Robbin as promised. The table in which we sat was too small to allow all of us to be in one table, but nevertheless we crunched as sardines to allow a maximum of us to join (we were 12 in table for 8 people).

I remember Ian Thomas complaining (joking) that there wasn’t room for him, but we then crunched again to make some more room.
From my right here is the list of people that was sited on our table:

During Emetrics San Francisco I had the opportunity to visit Google (I’ll blog about that in the coming days) and to have a look at the alpha version of Gatineau. This made me want to emphasize and explain our Code of Ethics as independent consultants.

Finally home and settled in after a very long week in San Francisco. Still a bit jet lagged and Bruno was nice enough to remind me this morning that per hour difference, I should count on 1 full day to get used to European timing again so I’m figuring that within 7 days, all should be fine again with my internal clock. One only hopes! as I’m leaving for London again next week.

First of all, it’s been a fabulous experience in San Fran thanks to the likes of Jim, Avinash and of course Eric. Truely this experience beats my last 29th birthday for the 2nd time, when I decided to hop over to Shangai to check out the scenary in China some 5 years ago. Having 500 people singing happy birthday to you and one of the major Web Analytics gurus taking time out of his presentation to put “that poor woman on stage” is a memory I’ll always cherish. Thank you for that, for your support and dedication to this passionate field. I’m sure we’ll all experience some very interesting times ahead and I’m really looking forward to future collaborations. (more…)

If you attended Emetrics, chances are that you heard about the Lobby Bar and that you have attended to one of the sessions.
The concept is rather simple, every night after dinner, people meet at the Lobby Bar (the bar of the Hotel). I have to admit that I’m a huge fan of this and this week I attended all the sessions from Saturday night to friday night.

It’s great to network with other Industry professionals and we really have all the profiles (Vendors, Consultants, Practitioners, and of course our Godfather).

At San Francisco, as the Hotel bar was closing at midnight, we continued the reunion in a bar just across the street that hopefully stayed open until 2am.

I warmly encourage the attendees of future Emetrics Summits to join us at the Bar 😉

Thursday night, after having a wonderful dinner at a Brazilian restaurant with Andrea, Jim, Matthew and Aurélie we launched a new concept: the last day at the Lobby Bar it’s chocolates time! But not any chocolates: Belgian Marcolini’s chocolates! I’m sure that all that attended our wedding have memories arising (Mmmm Marcolini!)

So I guess that as from now on I’ll have to get some belgian chocolates to end each Summit we attend 😉

On Friday night Aurélie and I seem to be the only ones left at the Hotel, so after a great dinner at a Japanese restaurant, we went to the Bar to have our last drink before going to bed as we had to catch up an early flight on saturday morning and get back to our normal life.

Aurélie and I just got back home after filling in a complaint for lost luggage at the airport… (thanks American Airlines). So we are back in our little Brussels and it’s great to be home, the birds sing this Sunday morning (home sweet home).

This morning, here at Emetrics we had a great panel session with THE 4 most important Web Analytics Gurus (Jim, Bryan, Eric & Avinash). We had over 40 people joining the session from around the world that could not only follow the discussion, but also send questions. The international attendees are members of the Web Analytics Association as this was a members only session (in addition to the lucky ones that were present in San Francisco).

Thanks to the WAA and specially to Vicky and Brian without whom this wouldn’t have happened (and thank you Lars for coming up with the name of this online event ;-)).

This event was recorded, so if you want to have access to it in the coming weeks, you just need to do one thing: BECOME MEMBER OF THE WAA!

I’ll be posting a little ‘chupachups’ video in the coming days of this session and publish all the questions that were adressed from the attendees (physically and virtually), you’ll see all the answers from this great minds in the members section of the WAA website.

Google has just announced here in San Francisco the release of the Version 2 of Google Analytics. We are very excited at OX2 as we have been testing this new version since a bit more than a month now. As you know part of our Web analytics team attended the GAAC training in Dublin a couple of months ago and they also got trained on this new version.

It is radically different from the current version and incorporates great new features (I love the big bounce rate percentage and the export functionnalities have really been improved). I won’t enter into details right now as you know I’m not an Analyst (as I like to say, I’m just the sales guy ;-)).

Julien will be publishing in the coming hours a post about this new version! And we will publish more insights in the coming days/weeks.

So if you’re using Google analytics expect a radical change (but don’t worry there will be a transition period in which you will still be able to use the previous interface).

I have to admit that for Aurélie and I it wasn’t a big surprise as we were in the secret since a couple of months now when Eric contacted us to propose Aurélie to join his Board of Advisors (Nevertheless, Aurélie got her surprise as before starting his presentation Eric took her on stage and sang Happy Birthday to her -she just turned 29 for the sixth time yesterday- along with the 500 attendees – I’ll post a little video about this ;-)). I remember the day he sent us an email asking us to have a chat with him over Skype. Back then, we were really surprised by his future move and pretty honored to be not only among the firsts to know his secret but also his will to have Aurélie to join his Board of Advisors (thank you Eric, we will always be grateful for your trust and confidence).

So what is it all this about, what Eric plans to do? What are his objectives? What’s his company positioning?

Eric has created his company around what he calls ‘The Truth About Web Analytics”: (more…)

For those of you who do not know Jim Sterne (Who doesn’t know Jim Sterne?), I like to call him the Godfather of Web Analytics. In the WA Industry you have Gurus, Vendors, Consultants and Practitionners, but only one Godfather and that’s Jim Sterne (if you want a proof just view this).

Jim has been in the Web Analytics since it exists. He has not only written about it (you may read for example a very interesting White Paper he wrote in 2000 with Matt Cutler or buy one of his books at Amazon). He has also been the creator and responsible of the Emetrics Summit, the must attend event around Web Analytics that happens 4 times a year (Mmmm, rumors say that he will expanding his operations shortly, so keep up visiting http://www.emetrics.org). The Emetrics Summit are 2 to 3 days events that take place in the US and Europe allowing Web Analytics professionals not only to attend astonishing and outstanding presentation, but also network in order to exchange ideas and points of view.

Jim’s views on the Web Analytics team:

Last Year, during his keynote speach, Jim described the different competences needed in a Web Analytics team: (more…)

About:

This is the blog of WebAnalytics.be, a Business Unit of OX2, a pan-European Interactive Agency based in Bussels capital of Europe.
This Blog has been created to allow our team members to share with you and the rest of the world their ideas thoughts and views on Web Analytics.